China launches rover toward Mars
BEIJING — China launched its most ambitious Mars mission yet on Thursday in a bold attempt to join the United States in successfully landing a spacecraft on the red planet.
Engines blazing orange, a Long March-5 rocket took off under clear skies from Hainan Island, south of China’s mainland, as space enthusiasts gathered on a beach across the bay from the launch site.
“This is a kind of hope, a kind of strength,” said Li Dapeng, co-founder of the China branch of the Mars Society, an advocacy group. He watched with his wife, 11-year-old son and 2,000 others on the beach.
Launch commander Zhang Xueyu announced to cheers in the control room that the rocket was flying normally about 45 minutes later. “The Mars rover has accurately entered the scheduled orbit,” he said in brief remarks shown live on state broadcaster CCTV.
China’s space agency said the rocket carried the probe for 36 minutes before successfully placing it on the looping path that will take it beyond Earth’s orbit and eventually into Mars’ more distant orbit around the sun.
Liu Tongjie, spokesman for the mission, said the launch was a “key step of China marching towards farther deep space.” He said China’s aim wasn’t to compete with other countries but to peacefully explore the universe.
It marked the second flight to Mars this week, after a United Arab Emirates orbiter blasted off on a rocket from Japan on Monday. And the U.S. is aiming to launch Perseverance, its most sophisticated Mars rover ever, from Cape
Canaveral, Florida, next week.
“It’s amazing that another nation has launched the case for Mars,” said Katarina Miljkovic, a planetary scientist at Curtin University in Australia. “It’s more like this marathon of space that we all want to be running.”
China’s tandem spacecraft — with both an orbiter and a rover — will take seven months to reach Mars, like the others. If all goes well, Tianwen-1, or “quest for heavenly truth,” will look for underground water, if it’s present, as well as evidence of possible ancient life.
This isn’t China’s first attempt at Mars. In 2011, a Chinese orbiter accompanying a Russian mission was lost when the spacecraft failed to get out of Earth’s orbit after launching from Kazakhstan, eventually burning up in the atmosphere.
This time, China is going at it alone. It also is fast-tracking, launching an orbiter and rover on the same mission instead of stringing them out.
China’s secretive space program has developed rapidly in recent decades. Yang Liwei became the first Chinese astronaut in 2003, and last year, Chang’e-4 became the first spacecraft from any country to land on the far side of the moon.
Conquering Mars would put China in an elite club.
“There is a whole lot of prestige riding on this,” said Dean Cheng, an expert on Chinese aerospace programs at the Heritage Foundation in Washington.
The launch was “gutsy,” said Jonathan Mcdowell, an astronomer at the Harvard-smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. The next challenge is for the spacecraft to be “still working when it gets to Mars and survives entry and landing.”